The Prophetic Picture Reproduced
The New York Journal of Commerce emphasized the exactness of detail with which the prophecy described the scene as it appeared in 1833. This is the apocalyptic picture, as the ancient prophet saw it in vision:
"The stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind." Rev. 6:13.
A correspondent of the Journal of Commerce draws the picture as it was seen nearly eighteen centuries later, the likeness to the prophetic description being emphasized in every line:
"No philosopher or scholar has told or recorded an event like that of yesterday morning. A prophet eighteen hundred years ago foretold it exactly, if we will be at the trouble of understanding stars falling to mean falling stars."—New York Journal of Commerce, Nov. 14, 1833.
In this connection was noted by the same writer the special appropriateness of the prophet's figure of the fig tree casting the green figs in a mighty wind:
"Here is the exactness of the prophet. The falling stars did not come as if from several trees shaken, but from one. Those which appeared in the east fell toward the east: those which appeared in the north fell toward the north; those which appeared in the west fell toward the west; and those which appeared in the south (for I went out of my residence into the park) fell toward the south; and they fell not as ripe fruit falls; far from it; but they flew, they were cast, like the unripe fig, which at first refuses to leave the branch; and when it does break its hold, flies swiftly, straight off, descending; and in the multitude falling, some cross the track of others, as they are thrown with more or less force."
Professor Olmsted's long and carefully elaborated account in the American Journal of Science, gave a report from a correspondent in Bowling Green, Mo., as follows:
"Though there was no moon, when we first observed them; their brilliancy was so great that we could, at times, read common-sized print without much difficulty, and the light which they afforded was much whiter than that of the moon, in the clearest and coldest night, when the ground is covered with snow. The air itself, the face of the earth as far as we could behold it, all the surrounding objects, and the very countenances of men, wore the aspect and hue of death, occasioned by the continued, pallid glare of these countless meteors, which in all their grandeur flamed 'lawless through the sky.'
"There was a grand and indescribable gloom on all around, an awe-inspiring sublimity on all above; while—
"'The sanguine flood
Rolled a broad slaughter o'er the plains of heaven,
And nature's self did seem to totter on the brink of time!'
" ... There was scarcely a space in the firmament which was not filled at every instant with these falling stars, nor on it could you in general perceive any particular difference in appearance; still at times they seemed to shower down in groups—calling to mind the fig tree, casting her untimely figs when shaken by a mighty wind."—Volume XXV (1834), p. 382.
THE SIGN OF FIRE
"As this sign of fire in the watchtower was a signal to God's people anciently to flee from the coming danger (see Jer. 6:1), so the signs appearing now in the heavens and in the earth are God's signals of warning to the people of our day."